Whoa. In response to the Charlie Hebdo, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was removed from the AP’s image archives. Serrano discusses the original outcry over “Piss Christ”; he continues to advocate for freedom of expression. [Creative Time Reports]

Scams are everywhere on the Internet. Now they’ve inspired several new art commissions. Arjun Srivatsa discusses third-party pop-up ads, like MacKeeper, in “Human Inside,” a curatorial essay with commissions by himself, LaTurbo Avedon, Eltons Kūns, and Giselle Zatonyl. [Rhizome]

Poetweet will craft your tweets into a poem of the sonnet, rondel, or indriso variety. It’s a new site, so don’t expect it to work perfectly 100 percent of the time. [Poetweet via @mfortki]

In the world of art law, a new bi-coastal firm, Spencer Kerr LLP, has opened offices for “international clients with business and investments in art.” For a spicy take on art law, see our “Two Experts” interview between Franklin Boyd and Sarah Conley Odenkirk. [Business Wire]

And if you’re interested in the book Conley Odenkirk’s book “A Surprisingly Interesting Book About Contracts” discussed in the interview, you can buy it here. Only seven left! [Amazon]

Betting on the Super Bowl Is now an American tradition amongst museums. This year the Seattle Art Museum and the Clark Art Institute will bet art loans on the winner of this weekend’s Super Bowl. This tradition was established by Tyler Green in 2010. [Art Daily]

On the past and future of teledildonics. (You know, electronic sex toys.) [VICE]

Emoji portraits of Miley Cyrus and other celebrities by Yung Jake. [Miley Cyrus on FB, via Marina Galperina and CNET]

“While searching through the White House art loan records for the Nixon administration yesterday…” begins a typical Greg.org post. I love this. He notes that hundreds of the White House’s artworks went missing during the Nixon Administration. Were they on that helicopter?? The artworks were eventually returned, but again, we now know that Nixon could have smuggled hundreds of artworks on his fucking helicopter. Records show that works were borrowed from the Smithsonian specifically for helicopter display, according to Greg Allen’s research. [greg.org]

Does anybody remember how and when the art PR business boom took off? We’re getting announcements about galleries’ hangings of a single new painting. [Our inboxes]

Where does Mel Bochner find words for his word-paintings? Why, Roget’s Thesaurus, of course. [e-flux]

The online art market is worth either $1.57 billion or $3.47 billion, if you believe one of these two reports. [artnet news]

The Tribeca Film Festival is over, but you can watch some of the short films online. [Tribeca Film Festival]

Adjunct professors have it rough. On the Fugitive Faculty blog, Miranda Merklein gives 10 tips to full-time professors on how they can improve relationships with their part-time colleagues. The tips are saddening, like “Stop advising us to quit our jobs.” [Fugitive Faculty via @CollegeArt]

Tyler Green cries conflict of interest again, this time on the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which will be showing Norman Rockwell’s “The Rookie (Red Sox Locker Room)” before its anonymous owner auctions it off at Christie’s next month. Green feels that the MFA’s acting as an auction house showroom. Eh. See it on a free admission day. [The Boston Globe, Tyler Green]

Another conflict of interest story, and flagrant backroom dealing: The Northampton town council made a deal with Lord Northampton to sell off one of an Egyptian statue, which the Lord’s grandfather donated to the Northampton Museum. Valued at between £4m-£6m, Christie’s calls it “the most important Egyptian sculpture ever to come to market.” The Arts Council is threatening to discredit the Northampton Museum if it goes ahead with the sale. [The Art Newspaper]

Matthew J.X. Malady writes about how Flickr is more useful to freelancers than stock photography sites. Also great: Malady’s found photos of the first “phablet,” the original Dell Streak. Ah, a trip down memory lane. [The Awl]

Art dealer Hillel Nahmad will receive his sentencing today in Manhattan court for his involvement in a gambling ring. In lieu of prison time, his lawyers are requesting that Nahmad fund an art program for homeless youth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [The New York Times]

Walter Robinson observes how, in galleries and the auction houses, 80s artstars (Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, and David Salle, among others) are back. He’s not exactly sure why that is, other than “now that it’s history, it can begin its endless comeback.” [Artspace]

“When I painted a Matisse, I became Matisse. When I painted a Chagall, I was Chagall. When I painted a Picasso, I was Picasso.” Interviews with a slew of art forgers reveal that they have strategies similar to method acting. [ARTnews]

By now, you’ve probably heard about the controversial whitewashing over “graffiti mecca” 5Pointz in Long Island City. Gothamist found at least one person who doesn’t think the mecca’s end is so bad; the works were “safe.” As recognized by the original agreement, the building didn’t allow political, religious, or X-rated graffiti. [Gothamist]

A nice piece by Tyler Green that ruminates on how California’s state freeway has influenced art makers. [Modern Art Notes]

Rob “Still the Mayor of Toronto” Ford’s TV show debuted this week; it was cancelled soon after the first episode. [Slatest]

The Animal staff go to Toronto to buy crack and investigate the Rob Ford situation. They manage to buy crack, fact-check their crack and speak to an actual crack smoker about the mayor’s seemingly out-of-control antics. “It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed. Even as a smoker, I can’t see how you’re going to sit down with a bunch of people and say you want help for the city.” She blows out enough smoke to change the color of the room and continues. “No one is going to take him seriously.” [Animal]

“The selfie is a revolution against the camera’s tyranny. It puts the person being photographed in control of the photograph. It is an art of freedom.” Surprisingly, the Guardian’s curmudgeonly art critic Jonathan Jones comes out swinging for the selfie in art. He may have confused “freedom” with “pointing a camera at your face.” But maybe there is a selfie revolution, with liberty and justice for all. [The Guardian]

"Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin", Francis Bacon, 1957

WSJ’s comparing buying a Bacon painting to buying the services of a sports player (“The Art of Fielding”). William Powhida points out that unlike art, a player isn’t “private property that we may or may not see again.” [Wall Street Journal]

AFC’s twitter feed is filled with tweets expressing horror over last night’s record breaking auction results at Sotheby’s. (This sales video for Warhol’s Car Crash prompted ArtInfo’s Tyler Green to ask how the Sotheby’s people live with themselves). What people buy isn’t the problem here. It’s the income inequality driving the success of these auctions that deserves outrage and action. [Twitter]

The term “hedge fund activist” has been coined. Apparently this term describes shareholders who exert pressure on the companies they’ve invested in, to change in directions they see fit. Daniel S. Loeb, for example, thinks Sotheby’s needs a makeover. [Dealbook]

Lily Allen takes issue with sexism in the music industry. Cue the think pieces. [The Guardian]

Selina Gomez is in the sentimental art film “Searching” by Victoria Mahoney. She’s wearing lingerie, so I guess that’s reason to talk about it? [The Superficial]

Jerry Saltz on Reddit AMA. Regular Saltz readers will be familiar with most of his answers, but he did remind us (AFC’s Paddy Johnson) that we like Francis Bacon a whole lot more than Saltz. His 2009 show at the Met was fantastic. [Vulture, summary]

An activist artist in Switzerland is gathering signatures for a minimum federal income distributed to all people. The New York Times’ Annie Lowry doesn’t think it’s that crazy, arguing that here and abroad it would only be a better use of money locked up in welfare. [New York Times]

Power bloggers Marina Galperina and Laurie Penny get together to discuss cybersexism, and it’s great. Penny says, “Look. The internet makes dicks out of us all, but it means that for a few people, the perceived costs of extreme douchebaggery are far lower than they would be otherwise.” [AnimalNY]

At least the problem’s acknowledged, and in response, the Guardian has almost all women on its op ed page today. [Guardian]

Damien Hirst isn’t showing Qatar the D cause they didn’t work for it even. [The Independent]

If you wanna binge on links and art vids, Bad at Sports is a goldmine right now. [BadatSports]

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Director David Franklin has resigned “for personal reasons,” and the board wishes him well. That’s about all a cleveland.com reporter sought to find out about the situation, but it was immediately followed by the news that the museum would be auctioning off a few works through Christie’s. Possibly this has something to do with the $350 million expansion? Tyler Green wants better reporting.

As long as that Cleveland Scene story has really thin sourcing I can hope it’s not true, right? Wow. (Not sharing ’til it’s better sourced.)

G. Wayne Clough, the Smithsonian secretary who censored the 2011 “Hide/Seek” exhibit on queer portraiture, has finally resigned. An independent curator of the exhibit told the Washington Post that Clough’s “tenure represents one of the last links to an older model of the way museums relate to the lesbian and gay queer community.” But, as Tyler Green points out, the Post itself minimizes Clough’s censorship by burying the story and mislabeling “Hide/Seek”‘s many defenders (including MoMA) as simply “gay activists.” [MAN] [The Washington Post]

“The Art world is the new music world,” Swiss Beatz said at a carnavalesque opening for the Galerie Perrotin on Tuesday, when the Parisian gallery (the supposed “French Gagosian”) set up shop on Madison Avenue. The afterparty, held at the Russian Tea Room, was an art-world carnival of Damien Hirst spin-art booths and crane-clawing for Murakami plush toys. “Our collectors are in the center of the art world, and you always have to surprise them,” said Mr. Perrotin…“People need pleasure” [New York Times]

If you missed it over twitter, yesterday was #AskaCurator day, in which twitter took its questions to 622 museums worldwide. Hyperallergic has a list of questions which should have been better addressed, most of them about the museum world’s enduring whiteness. [Hyperallergic]

The same questions have been raised perennially by John Powers, and specifically last week on NPR by Deborah Solomon. “This is an art season that could make you think that the feminist movement never happened,” Solomon noted, in reference to an excess of retrospectives for creepy white males (Burden, Balthus, Magritte). Walter Robinson put the question to facebook and points to John Powers’ 2011 proposal for an art world Title IX program, the 1972 law illegalizing gender discrimination in higher education. He thinks it’s worth a shot, and so do we; more on that to come. [John Powers; Deborah Solomon; Walter Robinson]

The gender situation, at least, looks a little better in Chicago, based on NewcityArt’s Art 50 round-up. In the institutional department, Madeleine Grynsztejn and Michelle Grabner lead the pack. [Newcity]

TONIGHT: Pin-Up and Gayletter host the afterparty for the Art Book Fair preview, near PS1. Expect this to be packed. [Gayletter]

Woohoo! The Rob Pruitt Art Awards are back. (But no mention of the Guggenheim as their venue this time around?) Looks like AFC has some work to do… In the meantime, nominate your friends. [The Art Awards]

Gretchen Bender once said that artists are depicting a society already living outside its own reality. Martha Schwendener, The New York Times reviewer writing glowingly about her show at the The Kitchen, notes this while explaining that the aesthetic of Bender’s installations and videos create a bridge between an undead past and an uncertain future. Gotta see this show. [The New York Times]

Bloomberg stretches for a trend and finds a few erotic threads; The British Museum will open Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art and Gustuv Klimpt will make an appearance at the National Gallery. Consider yourself informed. [Bloomberg]

Tyler Green has spotlighted The Detroit Institute of Arts for his latest podcast, in light of the unfolding crisis in Detroit and how it might affect the museum. Consider this your listen for the day. It’s important. [Modern Art Notes]

The Governor’s Island Art Fair launches this weekend, and will be open every full weekend this September. Time to take a ferry! [Hyperallergic]

We owe it to Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes for spearheading “A Day for Detroit” and provoking a veritable downpour of tweets and blog posts. Green urged fellow art bloggers to post their favorite works from the Detroit Institute of Arts and tweet with the hashtage #DayDetroit to raise awareness for the museum’s collection. Given the volume of activity, we spent the better part of our day summarizing what happened.